A young woman intercepted them at the bottom of the stairs before either of them had caught their breath, blonde hair pulled back in a hurried braid, a student uniform slightly askew as though she'd dressed too fast to bother with the details. Corren and Baris both froze for half a second, caught off guard by how striking she was up close.
"I heard about what you did," she said, addressing Corren directly, urgency threading through every word. "You dueled someone who was harassing your friend and made him back off." She drew a breath, steadying herself. "I need help. There's a man trying to convince my father to marry me off to him, and his family has enough influence to make it happen whether I agree or not. Please. I don't know who else to ask."
Baris stepped forward before Corren could respond, chest puffed out with the same reflexive chivalry that had gotten him into trouble more than once already. "I'm his best friend, and I'm a strong knight too," he declared. "I'll help you."
Corren rolled his eyes, though not unkindly, and raised a hand to slow the whole exchange down before Baris's enthusiasm ran them all somewhere they weren't ready for. "We don't know who you are, or who this man is, or what your father actually wants in all this," he said, tone level and careful. "Meet me after class. Tell me everything, from the start, and we'll figure out what's actually possible."
He turned to Baris next, fixing him with a look that had become fairly practiced over these past weeks. "And you. Nothing reckless until we know the whole shape of this."
Baris mimed drawing a solemn cross over his heart, eyes wide with feigned innocence, and the girl nodded, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders now that someone had finally agreed to listen.
The three of them parted ways at the base of the stairs, the girl hurrying off toward her own class with a final, grateful glance back over her shoulder, Baris practically vibrating with eagerness to know more, and Corren already turning the fragments of her story over in his mind the same careful way he turned over every half-finished chant he'd ever encountered: not enough pieces yet to see the whole shape of it, but enough to know, with the certainty of a man who had learned to trust that instinct across two entire lives now, that whatever came next was going to matter a great deal more than one afternoon's favor.
He had no way of knowing yet how much that afternoon would cost, or who it would cost it to. For now, there was only the after-class conversation still ahead of him, and the growing, familiar sense that the world he'd been reborn into was not finished handing him things to translate.
End of Part One.
"Every language I have ever studied has a word for duty. Most of them have no word for choice at all. I used to think that was a translation problem. It isn't."
Class let out into a courtyard gone gold with early afternoon light, and the blonde girl was waiting exactly where Corren expected her to be: pressed against the base of a stone column, arms crossed over her books like a shield, watching the doors the way a person watches a door they are afraid will open onto bad news.
She unfolded the moment she saw him. "You came," she said, and there was real surprise in it, as though she'd spent the whole hour between classes preparing herself for the version of this where he didn't.
"I said I would." Corren glanced around the thinning courtyard out of old habit, the same reflex that had once made him check a lecture hall for hecklers before he opened his mouth. Nobody was paying them any particular attention. "You never told me your name."
"Celeste." She said it like an apology, as though the omission had been rude rather than simply frightened. "Celeste of Clan Amniel."
"Corren of Clan Ashvale." He inclined his head, the small formal courtesy the Academy drilled into every trainee within the first week, and watched the tension drop out of her shoulders by a fraction, as if the ritual of proper introduction was itself a kind of proof that this conversation was going to be conducted like a reasonable one and not a plea shouted across a stairwell. "Baris told me you're being pressured into a marriage."
"Not pressured." Celeste's mouth twisted around the correction, precise even in distress. "Arranged. There's a difference, and my father would tell you the difference matters." She drew a breath, and when she spoke again her voice had steadied into something more practiced, the cadence of a girl who had rehearsed this explanation more than once in the privacy of her own room before she'd ever worked up the nerve to say it to a stranger. "Clan Amniel used to be a house of holy magic. Generations ago, before either of us was born, that made us worth marrying into on our own merits. We lost the gift. I don't know when, exactly, or why, only that by the time my grandmother was my age it was already gone. A clan without a living magic and without a male heir to inherit what land it still holds is a clan other families marry for leverage, not for love. My father has been fielding offers for me since I was twelve." She said this the way another girl might report the weather: a fact of her life, unpleasant, not up for debate. "Torvent of Clan Magnus made the best offer. Best for my clan, I mean. Not for me."
The name landed somewhere Corren recognized instantly, the same charismatic swordsman Baris had pointed out with open, unguarded envy during their first week of drills: undefeated, magnetic, the kind of upperclassman whose name got dropped in hallway conversation the way a title gets dropped, more rank than person. "I know who he is," Corren said. "I didn't know he was collecting a wife along with his trophies."